Under a baking hot desert sun, work is picking up pace at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur, the capital of India’s Rajasthan state.

Workmen are assembling corporate boxes for rental to local gem merchants and other small businesses ahead of Friday’s opening of the DLF Indian Premier League, the country’s newest and richest cricket tournament.

Based on the shortened Twenty20 format of the game and designed for prime-time television, the 44-day tournament has turned cricket into big business. Modelled on English football’s Premier League, and with eight new privately owned teams, the IPL is the first Indian domestic competition to involve large numbers of international players.

At the Jaipur ground, workers are also building a stage for live performances. With excitement over the tournament reaching fever pitch, team owners are vying to outdo each other with promises of lavish Bollywood shows at the games.

Some are resorting to even wilder gimmicks – liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who owns the Royal Challengers Bangalore team, is planning to fly in 12 cheerleaders and two choreographers from the Washington Redskins American football team.

Fast wicket

• Based on the shortened Twenty20 form of the game, each match will last three hours, compared with a full day for one-day internationals or several days for test matches
• Eight teams will compete over 44 days starting today, with seven home matches per team
• The top four teams will contest semi-finals and then a grand final – all in a weekend
• Team franchises fetched a $724m (£364m) total. Sony's Indian unit and a partner paid more than $1bn for broadcast and promotional rights

“This is now no longer just about cricket because a couple of people have gone mad,” said Fraser Castellino, chief executive of Emerging Media, which owns the Rajasthan Royals, Jaipur’s IPL team. The UK-based company is the only foreign owner of a franchise. Australia’s Lachlan Murdoch also owns part of the Royals.

Indian corporations and multinationals have flocked to the competition, eager to find an advertising medium that will enable them to target the country’s emerging young consumer classes.

Created late last year by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which has an official monopoly over the sport, the IPL has already made close to $2bn (€1.25bn, £1bn) from the sale of television and promotional rights, sponsorships and licences.

The lavish sums invested in the tournament before a single game has been played have prompted concern that the BCCI and the team owners, who range from Mr Mallya to Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, might be getting ahead of themselves.

While cricket is a national passion in India, some argue this is reserved for the so-called “Men in Blue” – the country’s national team. Domestic competitions in the past have failed to generate much excitement.

“It’s not that we love the sport in this country. It’s that we love the Indian national cricket team,” said Ajay Jadeja, a cricketer and TV sports analyst.

Even Lalit Modi, chairman of the IPL, admits building team loyalty will be a challenge. “I don’t expect fan bases to be developed overnight,” he said.

He argued that the BCCI had created a system that would enable team owners to weather several years of losses while they build up support. Under this arrangement, franchises will receive a large part of the proceeds of television broadcasting rights, worth more than $1bn over 10 years. The BCCI will also give the franchises a portion of revenues from centrally contracted sponsorship and supplier deals.

The tournament is also designed to ensure that franchisees’ overheads are kept to a minimum, with franchisees renting stadiums from state cricket associations.

The hope of guaranteed revenues and low infrastructure bills has won over prospective franchisees, who have paid the BCCI a total of $724m – well above the floor price of $50m a team.

Even with all this cash flowing in, however, teams will struggle to break even. The Rajasthan Royals, one of the most cost-conscious teams, calculates that in the first year expenses could be around $20m and revenue about $14m. It could take about three years to break even and five to make a profit, the team calculates.

The teams will need a good crowd response from the start. But at the Sawai Mansingh stadium, where ticket prices start at just Rs50 ($1.20, €0.80, £0.60), initial sales have been muted.

Despite this the Royals will not be spending big dollars on Bollywood stars to try to draw the crowds. They have opted instead for entertainment from a local singer in Jaipur, Mr Castellino said.

“We have to follow and do the whole entertainment thing but to me it is nonsense,” he said. “To me it’s very clear: this is a cricket match, the main entertainers are the players.”

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Opportunity for new talent

Mahesh Rawat, a 22-year-old wicketkeeper in Indian domestic cricket, received a call a few months ago asking him to join the Rajasthan Royals, a new Indian Premier League team to be based in the historic “Pink City” of Jaipur.

This week, Rawat was undergoing intensive training from Shane Warne, the star Australian bowler who is the Royals’ captain and coach.

“We are playing with the legends of cricket and I hope to get some of their skills,” he said.

For Rawat and teammates such as Taruwar Kohli, a batting star of this year’s under-19 world cup, and Parag More, a 23-year-old bowler, the IPL offers new opportunities in a game that until now favoured only a small elite.

Like others who started as children playing gulli (street) cricket, they aspire to join the national team. But the difficulty of becoming one of the chosen few means that thousands of talented players have to be content with low-profile careers in purely domestic tournaments.

In fact, it is largely thanks to state-owned companies, such as the Indian Railways, that many players are able to make a living at all from the sport.

Rawat and More both work for the Indian Railways, which fields 32 professional sides in local competitions.

Now they hope the commercial glitz associated with the IPL and the huge domestic and international media attention will take their careers to a new level.

After only a few days with his new teammates, Warne agrees. “I’m sure the IPL will unearth a couple of stars,” he says.